"Anyone who's read Febos . . . knows that her work explores boundaries as deftly as it defies categorization. In this new collection of essays, she once again obliterates convention with her erotically charged and intellectually astute recollections of family, relationships and the search for identity." - Esquire, “The 5 Books You Should Read in February”
"No subject is off-limits to Febos. She authorizes her reader to be braver, to dig deeper into their own secrets and to research those secrets in history . . . In her close reading and recording of her own life, Febos universalizes the pain of waiting . . . with each new piece Febos bends time." - The Rumpus
"Erotic and dark, the book is a courageous exploration of love as the ultimate form of plenitude and annihilation. A lyrically visceral memoir of love and loss." - Kirkus Reviews
"Her mastery over metaphor is astonishing . . . What might be mere navel-gazing for a less brilliant author is made powerfully universal here. Though the particulars are hers, just about anyone can relate to the feeling of a chasm opening up inside. Febos’s awakening to her full identity, even its ugliness, is a powerful and redemptive epic." - starred review, Publishers Weekly
"It’s easy to fall in love with Melissa Febos' gorgeous new memoir of short essays. Febos brings a relentless curiosity and startling intimacy to the page . . . With her careful observations and introspection, she transcends isolation and captures the boundless nature of human emotion. Abandon Me is a fierce exploration of love and obsession, but it is something else as well—the story of woman who is unafraid to explore the harsh truths and choices that shape our lives." - LAMBDA Literary
"A raw, brave work about truly knowing oneself." - Library Journal
"[In this] collection of self-aware, stylish, autobiographical essays on love, addiction, and inheritance, Febos harnesses language, moods, actions, and settings with precision. A professor of creative writing, she stuns with sentences that are a credit to her craft and will no doubt inspire her readers." - Booklist
"Febos's gifts as a writer seemingly increase with the types of subjects and themes that typically falter in the hands of many memoirists . . . Febos transports, but her lyricism is always grounded in the now, in the sweet music of loss." - The Millions
"Searing and eye-opening at every turn . . . a must-read." - The Huffington Post, “27 Nonfiction Books By Women Everyone Should Read This Year”
"Riveting . . . emotionally raw and stirring in a way that will have you aching for more." - Newsweek, "Best New Books of the Week"
"Febos is a talented writer with a colorful personal history." - The Washington Post
"In her second book, Febos examines the many loves of her life—lovers as well as family—with her distinctive blend of lush language and relentless intelligence." - Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Publishers Weekly
"[A] sonorous collection of concentric essays . . . Febos' lyrical musings are intercut with astronomy, antiquity, and pop culture analyses . . . With Abandon Me, Febos engages a process of self-discovery that confirms an exceptional skill at illuminating universal truths." - Kirkus Reviews
"Intensely intimate and wide-ranging. . . . Febos is voracious in her emotional cravings, but none is stronger than her desire to know and own herself. The hard-won ending (truly, a beginning) is exhilarating." - Oprah.com
"Intimate and mesmerizingly vulnerable, Abandon Me is a boo[k] that gets at the heart of who we love, how we love—and why." - Refinery29, "Best Reads of February"
"A frequently stunning book, dealing with questions of family, identity, and intimacy." - Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Febos has established herself as a gifted writer with deep reserves of empathy and a bottomless hunger for personal truth. . . . Her prose is exciting and inviting because it feels both raw and lived in." - Guernica
"A gorgeous writer . . . [with] stunning gifts for metaphor and raw emotional truths." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Abandon Me proves unequivocally that there must be room in the literary canon for the complexity of women's stories on erotic fixation and loss." - Bitch Magazine
"Abandon Me is a beautifully written journey through Febos' world." - Buzzfeed
"A delicious follow-up to the salacious stories of [Febos's] work as a dominatrix [Whip Smart]. Those new to her writing will be insatiable for more after digging into her new offering, which details the queer writer’s relationship to love, loss and erotic addiction." - Gomag.com
"Febos complicates the human desire for connection with explorations in philosophy, psychology, and accounts of historical repression that seduce readers into inhabiting her myths while resisting sentimentality by dismantling the fictions with deft intellectual probing reminiscent of the work of Maggie Nelson. . . . One of Febos's greatest literary strengths is her ability to make these intimate experiences feel universal." - Bomb Magazine
"There is something pioneering about the way Melissa Febos talks about love, connecting it to all its binary shadows. . . . this book as a treatise on the siren call that leads us to re-stage events that have wounded us, so that we can produce a different ending, is absolutely luminous. The writing is crisp and unsettling." - KQED Arts
"Abandon Me commands an attention you’d have to beg for to be returned . . . As Febos writes, in explanation of this paradox, ‘we are all the conquered and conquerors.’ So then, if to be left by Febos’s writing is not the greatest pleasure you’ve ever felt, then you’ve read her book wrong. And that is the worst kind of abandonment." - Brooklyn Magazine
"A powerful, poignant meditation on not only the pain of loss but also the maddening, intoxicating, confusing and exhilarating effects of true human closeness." - Meghan Daum, author of THE UNSPEAKABLE
"Abandon Me is a voluptuous book about the relationship between sex and surrender, desire and addiction, vulnerability and power. Febos unfolds her dark romance with erotic charge and sensuous poetry." - Sarah Hepola, author of BLACKOUT
"It's rare to read a book as generous as it is genius. Febos intimately explores addiction, pain, pleasure, the uncontrollable character and the strangely joyful and terrifying nuances of abandonment. I don't know that I've ever felt more thankful to read a book. Abandon Me found me when I most needed it." - Kiese Laymon, author of HOW TO SLOWLY KILL YOURSELF AND OTHERS IN AMERICA
"An intricately constructed and emotionally devastating book about the appearance and disappearance of love. Febos is a strikingly talented writer who pushes at the boundaries of her form and shows us just how amazing and expansive it can be." - Jenny Offill, author of DEPT. OF SPECULATION
"Melissa Febos is the anthropologist and critic, the learned, dispassionate observer and the passionate advocate of her body’s passage through time, space, and the woes and pleasures of contact with other humans. Abandon Me reflects an extraordinary range of both experience and understanding." - Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 3 SECTIONS
"Intellectual, erotic, and lyrical, this book arrives at emotional truths that startle and dazzle. Febos spares no one. And who would want to be spared such ravishing?" - John D'Agata, editor of THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN ESSAY
"[Febos] has emerged as one of our most creative and most unflinching memoirists, essayists, and teachers." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Riveting and heartbreaking and tough and passionate and beautiful and original; a tour de force. Melissa Febos weaves the personal and the universal together into a provocative, brilliant, incredibly moving examination of power and identity." - Kate Christensen, author of BLUE PLATE SPECIAL
"Melissa Febos is a deep, broad and fearless thinker. This hard-fought, hard-won, endlessly compelling, and elegant memoir teaches us that our traumas are not isolated, but in constant conversation with each other, and promises that if we listen carefully to their steady murmuring, we might find the means and the power to heal our lives." - Pam Houston, author of CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED
"This book made me feel more than I was prepared to about desire and identity, as though it were an exquisite vivisection of what we politely call 'falling in love.' Febos's Abandon Me is extraordinarily written and unflinchingly bold." - Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of ACCIDENTAL SAINTS
"No one tells it like Melissa Febos. Sensual, lyrical, raw, brave, and honest, Abandon Me is simply gorgeous." - Ann Hood, NYT-bestselling author of THE KNITTING CIRCLE and AN ITALIAN WIFE
"I devoured these pages." - The Millions
"Melissa Febos is a gorgeously lyrical and insightful writer . . . this book is a recording and reckoning of love and loss and longing, evoked in gorgeous language dripping with sensuality, hope, and pain . . . We recognize our own losses in hers and understand them better through her wisdom and insight. We feel relieved to see them so beautifully and viscerally rendered." - Ploughshares
★ 09/19/2016
Febos’s (Whip Smart) second memoir is part lovesick devotional and part meditation on the intersection between desire and identity. She outlines the progression of a doomed relationship in exquisitely romantic detail (“Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open”) alongside the story of reconnecting with her birth father, a Wampanoag Native American and “career drug addict and alcoholic.” As she explores her native roots through the lens of historical trauma and cultural erasure, she finds an explanation for a viscerally felt absence and her willingness to be “colonized” by a controlling lover. She captures the contradictions of female sexuality, complicated further when the object of one’s desire is another woman, and delves into the push and pull of the other relationships that molded her, as with her adoptive father, a sea captain whose fierce love and frequent absence were contradictory formative influences: “Every time he left port, we wrecked again.” Her mastery over metaphor is astonishing: describing a moment of heartache, she writes, “I was the sound of breaking. Pedestrians and bicyclists looked around, covered their ears.” What might be mere navel-gazing for a less brilliant author is made powerfully universal here. Though the particulars are hers, just about anyone can relate to the feeling of a chasm opening up inside. Febos’s awakening to her full identity, even its ugliness, is a powerful and redemptive epic. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Mar.)This review has been corrected to fix a typo.
2016-12-06
An award-winning nonfiction writer explores the personal roots of a powerful and destructive love/hate relationship she shared with a married lesbian. As a child, Febos (Creative Writing/Monmouth Univ.; Whip Smart, 2010) suffered from separation anxiety and nightmares, and she sleepwalked whenever her sea-captain father was away. When she was awake, she routinely "counted all the dangers my father might meet" and feared that she might be found unlovable enough that he would never return. Febos took solace in erotically charged stories that, as in the 1986 film Labyrinth, merged fantasy and horror. But in her teenage and young-adult years, her escapist tendencies took the forms of sexual obsessions with men and women and a drug addiction. When Febos met Amaia, a beautiful married lesbian who lived on the other side of the country, the attraction was immediate and intense. Amaia wooed her with expensive gifts that reminded her of the gifts her father would bring back to her. She writes, "each object was a promise, something I could hold when I could barely remember her face." Caught in a web of obligation and desire that was as pleasurable as it was disturbing, Febos began a cross-country relationship that, in its secrecy and impossibility, was profoundly erotic. Her lover made Febos feel worshipped; Febos, in turn, found herself idolizing her lover. Yet at the same time, the author also experienced a primal fear of abandonment that came from Amaia's physical, and at times emotional, unavailability. Her understanding of the relationship was heightened by her own coming to terms with the part-Native American, substance-abusing biological father she never knew growing up. With Amaia, she experienced both the paternal genetic legacy of addiction as well as the traumatic "legacy of abandonment, of erasure" that was her birthright as a Native American. Erotic and dark, the book is a courageous exploration of love as the ultimate form of plenitude and annihilation. A lyrically visceral memoir of love and loss.
